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Vengeance review
:. Director: Johnnie To
:. Starring: Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Testud
:. Script: Ka-Fai Wai
:. Running Time: 1:48
:. Year: 2009
:. Country: Hong Kong
:. Official Site: Vengeance
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If revenge is a dish best served cold along the side streets of Macao and Hong Kong, it's still ccompanied by spicy sauces which kick it up several notches.
Which is all good, because when it's about the cinema of Johnnie To, it's nice to sit down at the table. The Vengeance project was born during many restaurant meetings. Onscreen, the protagonists aren't merely satisfying a human need. Several meal scenes tell stories, sketch portraits and take part in the development of the plot: sentences of death are pronounced there, and people die there as well. While the visual virtuosity of the director from Hong Kong director is expressed in these bullet storms, where one pulls the trigger as one carries out like a dance move, where these heroes of the modern western, elegant, noble and proud, die with a cigarette in their moouth after having shared a picnic with their enemies.
What could be more natural, then, than to make Costello, the hero of the film, a restaurant owner? In exchange for this restaurant located on the Champs-Elysées, some bundles of euros and a watch, this foreigner who comes to avenge the massacre of his family, hires the services of three hired killers he met in his hotel, while they were carrying out a hit in a neighboring room.
From this scenario, Johnnie To delivers one of his better successes since at least Election 1 and 2. A thriller inspired by the films of Melville and Leone, the film is nourished by their references and delivers its own recipe, rich in ingredients. Because with To, it's not about the dialogue or script but above all the set. Each graduated shot is the work of a goldsmith, a space with characters whose choreography of movement is married with that of the camera, or of other accessorties, like the frisbee that the killers of two opposite camps toss at eachother during their first confrontation.
To incarnate this figure of a French whodunnit thriller, To chose another Johnny: Hallyday. Wearing a seventies raincoat and out of date hat, the actor plays the foreigner card to the limits of caricature. Sober, the actor brilliantly manages to make us forget the singer, taking advantage his body and his luminous and piercing gaze.
Swarming with ideas, the film delivers memorable sequences, such as a shooting scene where the killers move a bicycle by aiming at it, another shooting scene in the moonlight, where each character takes his bullet, linking the group for good, or the reconstitution of the family massacre, during which Johnnie To shows his control of simultaneous montage. This friendship, like the name of the restaurant that Costello frequents, Les frères, enriches the plot of the film, since it is no longer a question of avenging his daughter and her family, but also the death of his new friends. In the end, one leaves Vengeance as one leaves a good meal shared with friends or family. Satisfied.
Moland Fengkov
 Fulltime Killer
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